


Slicer

by skitzofreak



Series: the foundations we are built on [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Cassian is truly devoted to the cause, F/M, Jyn is a hacker, but nothing graphic, mentions of in-universe atrocities, missing movie scene, the trip to Jedha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 07:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14972645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: The first interface is ridiculously simple to crack through. The second takes her a couple minutes of hunting around for the settings to the underlying input/output system, but it’s also a breeze. The third layer is where things get interesting.If this is Andor’s work…he’s good. He’s very good.





	Slicer

**Author's Note:**

> I bent a lot of the computer programming language, because I didn't want to bother with great accuracy. My excuse is "computers are different in a galaxy far, far away."

The good news is that the U-Wing has a holonet-enabled console in the back of the storage compartment. It’s slow as all hells, but it works, and it allows limited access to the Core world holonet servers. The bad news is that the console itself is several models out of date, the wires are stripped and ancient, the operating system looks like it rolled out during the Clone Wars era, and yet for some reason, it is absolutely packed with high-end firewalls, anti-virus software, and a form of encryption she hasn’t even seen before. Trying to break through that security system and get into the actual datapoint on the hard-drive would be like trying to fly backwards through a Hutt’s corkscrewing arsehole. During a pirate attack. Possibly while on fire.

Which makes it, as far as Jyn is concerned, a target of high interest. What could be on that ancient hunk of junk that someone would go to the trouble to encrypt it like that? Was it Andor? His droid? Neither of them make any noise about her hanging around back here.  When she accessed the console for the first time (covertly, in the middle of the night cycle when Andor climbed into the fold-out rack in the main cabin and at least pretended to sleep), no alarms had sounded, no rampaging droid or furious rebel soldier came bursting in to kill her for attempted theft. Still, she can’t imagine that Andor doesn’t know about the console, or that he knows someone else left data on it and hasn’t wiped it clean before she can get at it.

Saw would already have cut into this thing. In fact, he'd be appalled at her hesitance. (There are a lot of decisions she's made over the years that would appall him, but then, he gave up any right to complain when he dumped her as a kid, so fuck it. She's not thinking about what Saw would have wanted.)

There’s a chance that Andor left the console here as a test, to see if she could be trusted around Alliance data. (It's what Saw might have done, if he thought someone was weak enough).  But if that’s the case, he’s a moron and she’s definitely not interested in playing those kinds of games. Jyn spends a self-righteous hour of their first night in transit to Jedha just considering all the ways she could slice the console, and what kind of malware she would plant in it’s guts, just to teach him not to fuck with her like that. Her favorite worm causes older consoles like this to catch fire (on second thought, this is a small ship, and she doesn’t exactly have an escape if things get ugly. So maybe no fire.)

Three hours later, Andor feeds her. Well, he gives her some of his food, like it’s not a big deal and he doesn’t mind her eating something he cooked for himself. If Jyn hadn’t still felt the echoes of Wobani’s “nutritional management system” in her abused body, she would have blown him off. But her stomach clenches in painful memory when he points to the plate of food that, admittedly, smells amazing, and she caves. (Saw would be appalled. Her empty stomach doesn't care.)

They don’t speak any more that day until they reach the fuel station. Andor walks off the ship to charm the pants off the attendant, and probably meet a contact or two, judging by the careful look he shoots her as he jumps out of the U-Wing’s hatch. The droid stands at the communications array just behind the cockpit and does…whatever he’s doing, but it’s clear to Jyn that he only stays to keep an eye on her. If she tries to steal the ship or something, he will probably kill her, sure.

But the taste of that omelet lingers in Jyn’s mouth, and she’s finding it harder to believe that Andor would play mind games with her. Naturally, that might be exactly what a man playing mind games would want her to think. _Death takes the slow and the hesitant,_  (thanks for that one, Saw), so Jyn decides to stop waffling and prod at him, just a little.

She waits until the rebel has been gone on the fuel depot for a solid twenty minutes. The droid stays at the comm array, and doesn't speak to her once. Jyn sidles into the storage compartment and shuts the door all the way. She stands as far back from it as she can and waits another twenty minutes, breathing slowly, listening, her hand on the blaster at her hip.

Nothing.

The console beeps softly when she turns it on - the droid probably heard that, but he hasn’t stopped her from accessing it before and he doesn’t seem inclined to do so now. The first interface is ridiculously simple to crack through, it has a standard administrator password and a few button presses, a backdoor that the average tech-savvy adolescent can find on the holonet. The second takes her a couple minutes of hunting around for the settings to the underlying input/output system, but it’s also a breeze. The third layer is where things get interesting. She’s almost sure there are at least three hard-drives in this console, even though the factory-issue hardware only leaves room for two. Someone might have worked a newer, smaller kind of drive into the guts of it. She can either pull the whole thing to pieces to find it (slow, loud, obvious) or sift through the data trails and firewalls until she gets access (also slow, but quiet and potentially invisible). The third security layer calls for several tricky bits of programming and a cracker program she wrote a few years back – and that’s just to get access to the connectors for the two drives she can see and a ghost line of code that indicates the third is there.

If this is Andor’s work…he’s good. He’s very good.

The console screen fuzzes out and then clears, and Jyn smiles at the three pretty little drives that all pop up in her access window, nice and neat.

He’s good, but she’s _better._

Of course, she still can’t get to the data in all those drives, not if she doesn’t want to trigger what’s clearly a self-wipe program buried in the input processes. Nicely played, Captain. An old trick, but a good one. Fortunately, she knows the workaround.

Jyn selects the first drive and opens an administrative override program –

\- and then pauses.

In the Alliance interrogation room, that lady in white had seemed pretty far up the command chain. The general who practically accused Jyn of being the scum of the galaxy had clearly answered directly to her, and Andor had just as clearly answered directly to _him._ Also, Andor’s clearance in the base console had been…high.

 _No person guards an empty safe, unless it is a trap_ , Saw reminds her in her memory. He had said that while they were running from a botched smash-and-grab on an Imperial base somewhere in the...Wrea system? Probably Wrea. That was where they lost three soldiers and nearly a whole month's worth of recon work, because the data they had assumed was low-level had turned out to be the personal movements of some Moff and the stuff they had thought would be hard to get was just random fluff numbers for some bean-counter's report. Of course, at the time, Jyn had been a much less proficient slicer. These days, she probably could have grabbed both the Moff's data and the fluff reports without tripping a single alarm. Still, the threat remained, and she ought to take a moment to consider it.

If this is Alliance stuff, there’s a good chance it’s _important_ Alliance stuff. And if it’s important to the Alliance, then Captain Cassian Andor might kill to protect it. Oh, not right away, not while he still needs her, but the moment she’s done setting the Alliance up with Saw, he might just quietly slip up behind her in the dark and –

 _Death takes the slow, my child._ Jyn clenches her teeth and snarls back the little tendril of fear uncurling in her belly. Well, if he rides around with Alliance secrets in his old ship while knowingly carrying a slicer, then Andor is too stupid to be in charge of those secrets in the first place.

With that thought, the earlier righteousness flares up inside her, and Jyn attacks the firewalls with grim intensity. She’s going to find out what is in this console.

Two hours later, she hears the dull _clunk_ of the hatch opening again. The screen in front of her is still spooling through a long chunk of tricky code, running her fourth attempt at a breaching worm over the last, worst firewall. She glances at the chrono – two more minutes until the code completes it’s cycle, and she finds out if she made it or not.

On the other side of the door, K2SO says something prissy out in the main cabin, and Jyn hears a low Human voice answer. A series of smaller thunks and the faint rattling of the metal floor beneath her boots gets her attention (minute and a half left, almost there), and she climbs stiffly to her feet from where she’s been sitting cross-legged for awhile now. She ignores the cramping in her thighs and leans against the door. One minute on the program. The outer hatch clangs shut, and she hears the heavy tread of the droid moving back into the cockpit. She doesn’t hear Andor’s footsteps at all, which is concerning. Is he just standing out there? Forty five seconds. She’s not holding her breath, that would be ridiculous. But she’s having to _think_ about not holding her breath.

Another small _thunk_ on the floor outside. She strains her ears, but it’s silent out there. He must just be standing near the cockpit, maybe on that communications array. Maybe he’s sending a message back to his superiors. _Refuel number one complete, contacts met, the criminal is not dead yet and also likes my cooking…_

Twenty seconds.

Jyn presses her hands to the door and keeps one eye on the chrono countdown. 

Saw would kill an outsider who accessed his network, regardless of whether or not he needed them for a future op. Treason is a death-penalty offense.

Someone taps at the door.

“Hang on!” Jyn tries to sound nonchalant, but she’s so startled (she hadn’t heard a single footstep, _damn_ the man) that her voice comes out too loud. Considering that she’s right next to the door, it probably sounds like she’s screaming at him. She shakes her head, takes a deep breath, and checks the screen.

The chrono is at zero, and the code has vanished, leaving only three small icons at the bottom. The hell of it is, the only way to know if her latest slicing attempt worked is to select one of the icons and see if it opened. If she dives over there and flips off the console (the only way she can hide what she’s been up to from him), then she will probably lose access, and have to start over later. But if she doesn’t turn it off, her warden might try to lock her up in shackles again, or worse.

Jyn grimaces, and reaches for the power switch.

“I have some supplies,” Andor says softly from the other side of the door. “A little more than we need to get to Jedha.” A pause, and then. “You are welcome to them.”

Jyn’s fingers hover over the switch.

The droid says something muffled by distance and the door, and then to her complete shock, when Andor answers, his voice is also distant and muffled. Son of a kriffing bantha bitch, he walked away while she was hesitating, and she still hadn’t even heard him moving.

More importantly, he walked _away_. While she was shut up in the storage compartment, messing around with his console – which he had to guess she was doing. He had to. There was just no way he wasn’t expecting…

Jyn opens the door.

A series of small crates are set neatly next to the sealed hatch, and the low hum of engines starting up almost blocks out the quiet conversation between Andor and K2SO up in the cockpit. Jyn glances at the unsecured crates with a suspicious eye, because it seems unlikely that Andor is the kind of person to just leave things banging around on a moving ship. Belatedly, her brain makes the connection and she realizes that he’s only left them out because she was occupying the storage compartment.

Jyn leans against the wall and watches as Andor lifts the U-Wing out of range of the small fuel depot and the stars streak back into their glimmering hyperspace distortion. Her stomach flutters and her fingers feel clammy, but she doesn’t vanish back into the compartment. She waits. She doesn’t owe him anything, but she waits.

Andor says something offhanded to the droid as he gets up from his seat and walks back into the cabin, his step only stuttering slightly as he catches sight of her in the back. He recovers quickly, though, gesturing towards the crates before turning to the comm array.

Jyn pushes off from the wall and walks into the center of the cabin, standing quietly with her hands loose at her sides.

He glances up, holding the headset to his ear with one hand, his other pausing over the keyboard. He looks from her, to the open storage compartment, to the stack of crates by the hatch. Slowly, he lowers the headset back to the hook.

Jyn tilts her head, an invitation, a request. She doesn’t give him a chance to respond, though, she turns on her heel and marches back into the storage compartment.

This time, she hears him following. Barely. He really does tread so lightly. There’s a paranoid part of her already debating the merits of piling loose metal scraps around her body when she sleeps, _something_ noisy, anyway. Saw used to have those little proximity sensors he would leave scattered around his bed; what she wouldn't give for a handful of _those_ right now.

Jyn slinks into the storage compartment and puts her back firmly against the bulkhead, as far from the door as she can get. She’s still in arm’s reach from the console, but that can’t be helped no matter where she stands in the compartment. Andor stops at the door, watching her watch him. For a moment she almost thinks he’s going to refuse, going to read this as a trap and maybe just slam the door shut and lock her in. Instead, she can actually see the moment he decides to follow her: his jaw tightens, his mouth thins, and then he steps across the threshold and to the glowing console screen.

When he glances at it, his eyes widen slightly – she wonders if it’s the fact that she’s made it to the drives or that she’s found all three of them that startles him. Whatever the case, he whips his head around to stare at her again. “How much of these did you read?”

She shrugs, not sure how to play this (not sure what she’s even doing), and then scours his expression, looking for the signs that he’s marking her as a security risk.  (Treason is always a death-penalty offense.)

He turns back to the screen, and then closes his eyes. Sighs.

Then he taps the third, secret hard-drive icon.

Jyn only barely hides her surprise, both at his move, and at the fact that apparently her fourth attempt had actually worked. The drive opens immediately, and she sees a small collection of files. 

Andor steps back until he’s only just inside the door, as far from the console as he can get without leaving the compartment, and nods to the screen. An invitation. A request.

She steps closer, within arm's reach of him again, to stand in front of the console.

(Saw would be _appalled._ )

Jyn selects the first document.

It’s a list of…droid factories? No, droid facilities, places where droids are largely employed instead of organic sentients, usually because the conditions are too hellish for organics to survive long. Jyn scans the locations, but there is no obvious rhyme or reason to them, scattered as they are across wealthy systems, poor systems, Human-dominant and non-Human systems, planets with a lot of political power and planets that most of the galaxy would be hard pressed to even name. The only thing any of them have in common is that they largely operate under synthetic power.

The second file doesn’t clarify anything at all; it’s just a planet name (Antar 4, wasn’t that a Gotal world?) and then a long, long list of names. No further information, just names. The next file, Mantooine, was no different. Just names. The other files are also planets: Raydonia, Bosph, half a dozen more. Each file is just…names.

Jyn frowns at Andor, who is reading over her shoulder from the door. His face is oddly lit in the dim storage compartment, deep shadows contrasting with the harsh blueish light of the console. When he turns to meet her gaze, the blue light catches in his eyes and for a brief moment, Jyn feels like gravity shifts under her feet.

“A personal project,” he says at last, and his voice is so low she can barely hear it over the engines. He nods to the screen without looking away. “When the Empire falls, those droids will not be…” and now he does glance away, down at the bare metal floor, then back at her. “They will be a lower priority for the new government,” he finishes shortly, voice clipped, face impassive, but Jyn knows a deflection when she hears one. She can hear the determination under his light tone.

“But not for you,” she says, and it’s not quite a question.

To her surprise, Andor doesn’t shrug it off or deny it. He simply watches her from under his eyelashes. (In the back of her mind, a foggy memory - a man with a scraggly beard hunches over an old SE-2 farm droid, and holds out a hand to her, _hand me that spanner, Stardust, thank you, yes, come and see, Essie will be fine_.)

Jyn points at the screen. “The names are organic.”

“Records,” he replies.

“People you want to save?” She folds her arms, “like the droids?”

She means it to be a little dismissive, a little mocking, because this whole thing might yet be an act, Andor setting himself up as some kind of savior (or worse, he really does have a savior complex of some kind). But he doesn’t rise to it, doesn’t lecture her or get aggressive. He only shakes his head. “Too late for that,” he says softly. Before she can ask what the hells that means, he closes his eyes. “Antar Four, Lothal Year 3259, Moff Wilhelm Tarkin leads an Imperial task force to ‘pacify remaining Separatist terrorist cells.’” His voice sours on the Imperial name and the obvious Imperial double-speak, and Jyn’s guts twist because she already knows what “pacification” looks like under the Empire. She looks back at the first planet file, and taps the icon open. Rows and rows of names fill the screen, hundreds of them.

“Are they all…?”

He nods, eyes still closed, and his shoulders slump a little. It’s like she can see a weight settling on them, the exhaustion she noted before closing around him like a smothering shroud.

Her head aches a little, her throat feels tight.

“The Empire didn't care to remember what happened on those planets. So ISB wiped the official death records,” Andor continues, still in the low, dangerous voice. “As far as the galaxy knows, they are lost forever. There are rumors, though,” he opens his eyes again, and Jyn realizes with a start that he’s much closer than she thought – oh, that’s her fault, she seems to have moved forward while he was talking. How stupid. But his eyes are focused inward, staring at something in his memory only he can see, and if he’s about to attack her, she’ll eat her damn scarf.

So instead of shuffling back to the bulkhead across from the door, she looks up at him, and asks the question he’s inviting her to ask. “Rumors?”

“That someone downloaded the records before they could be wiped. Most of the stories claim that rebel was killed while passing the names on,” he winces, and she wonders if he knew that rebel personally, or if it’s only a general sort of grief passing behind his eyes before he continues. “But it’s generally believed that he did pass them on. And now they are…”

Jyn rests her hand on top of the console. Andor nods. “Among other places,” he adds with a small, brittle smile. “Just in case.”

Jyn flips off the console.

He raises an eyebrow at her. “There are two more drives.”

She shrugs. “What’s in the crates?”

The sudden shift in topic doesn’t phase him; he steps back from the door to leave her an open path to the pile. “Food, mostly. Some toiletries. A bedroll.”

She eyes him suspiciously. 

“Unless you want to share,” he says dryly, jerking his chin towards the currently stowed rack.

Jyn rolls her eyes and opens the crate he points to, pulling out a luxurious bedroll and a small attachable pillow. Any one of the Partisans she remembers would have given a limb to have something as nice as this bedroll. And he's, what, giving it to her? Just like that? When she turns her suspicious glare back at Andor, he’s across the cabin and fiddling with the communications array again, and he only gives her the barest, most innocent glance possible.

Jyn considers rejecting the gift (a trap, or an attempt at buttering her up, that has to be what’s going on here), but on the other hand…she’s cold, and tired, and it’s not like he can’t kill her a dozen other ways in her sleep. Booby trapping a bedroll is probably the dumbest way to snuff someone she’s ever imagined. It doesn’t really track that he would be trying to get her to like him, either. She’s already doing what he wants, and privately she acknowledges that she’s not being terribly subtle about wanting a few answers from Saw, herself. So he already knows she won’t jump ship, not until they are done on Jedha, when she supposedly should be free to go, anyway.

He keeps a list of dead people just because he thinks someone ought to.

Unbidden, and totally unconnected to anything, Jyn thinks – _her name was Lyra._

The bedroll looks comfortable enough, and warm. She can curl up in the storage compartment, assuming there’s any room left after she jams these crates in there.

“That was impressive, by the way,” he says casually, still not looking up from the comm array as she tosses the bedroll to the side and starts piling the crates in the storage room. “Did it take you the whole two hours?”

“Depends,” she grunts, shifting a particularly heavy crate full of dehydrated meat. She shakes her head when he offers a hand. “Did _you_ write the security, or the droid?”

Andor glances back at the cockpit, where the droid is sitting immobile at the control. “If I say it was mine?”

“Yeah, about two hours,” she confesses, dropping the meat with a careless thud in the compartment and kicking it into the far corner.

She turns back to the pile and finds herself face to face with Cassian Andor, who is holding one of the smaller crates of food helpfully out to her only a few steps away. Jyn decides that she is going to tie bells around his ankles as soon as she can find some. She’s contemplating the likelihood of finding any at their next fuel stop when suddenly, he smiles.

Jyn blinks.

Vaguely she thinks, _he has dimples._ It seems kind of unfair, for reasons she can’t quite nail down. “And if I say it was all Kay’s security?”

Jyn takes the crate from his hands, turns and tosses it on top of the meat. “Twenty minutes, tops.”

“My security algorithms are enhanced beyond the original capacity of my model,” K2SO comes to life in the cockpit, turning to glare at her with glowing optics once again. It's becoming a familiar pose. “Cassian helped me script them and I have run developing measures on them for eight point four years.”

Jyn shrugs one shoulder, pointedly does not look at the rebel’s face as she takes the next crate he hands her. “So they’re still _his_ algorithms,” she retorts.

If droids could breathe, she thinks, K2SO would have gasped. “I _said_ , I have been developing them independently for eight point – “

Cassian groans as he hands her another crate. “I told you,” he mutters under the snippy sound of his droid friend. “He doesn’t know how to lose.”

Jyn takes the last crate, accidentally catches his eye as he lets it go. He’s not smiling anymore, thank fuck, but he still looks a little too light around the edges for her comfort. Too much like someone she might want to see smile again. And that’s a very definite _no_ , so she looks away quickly and scrambles for something coherent to say. “Neither do I,” is the best she can come up with as she sets the last crate down and reaches for the bedroll. She can tuck herself up just under the console, between the dried meat and the bulkhead.

“Yes,” he says gravely, and she doesn’t turn back to check but she knows he’s watching her make her little nest all the same. “I believe you.”

He’s probably talking about her determined hacking at his secret console. There isn’t anything else he could be referencing. He doesn’t know her, doesn’t really know anything about her but what arrest warrants could reveal. It’s probably just a joke, or something he says to put people at ease. It doesn’t mean anything at all, and Jyn doesn’t care and isn’t going to think about it.

Jyn slips into the (really amazingly soft) bedroll and doesn’t look back at Andor for the rest of the night cycle. The bedroll is just as warm as it looks, and for the first time in months, she finds herself relaxing into her bedding almost immediately.

It’s just that there’s nothing else to do on this tiny ship, except talk to the spy and the droid. One of those forced proximity affections, she’s dealt with that before. Close quarters make people friends and then make them enemies, Saw always said, and kept a constantly shifting roster at all his smaller bases to avoid just that sort of chaos from happening. Andor’s being kind and Jyn’s being pleasant because they haven’t learned to hate one another yet.

Jyn checks that her vibroblade, her truncheon, and her blaster are all in place before she tucks the bedroll pillow under her head and the blanket tight under her chin. She closes her eyes, and very firmly puts any thoughts of lost names, spiced food, or dimples from her mind.

Tomorrow, she decides, she’s going to see about fixing that holonet connection. She has to keep herself occupied somehow. Safer all around, if she keeps her hands and her mind firmly focused. 

She falls asleep in minutes, and dreams of voices calling from the black rocks and green hills of a planet the Empire didn't care to remember.

**Author's Note:**

> The [Antar Atrocity](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Antar_Atrocity) was an Imperial "exercise" about 18 years before A New Hope - the Emperor was "cleaning up" leftover Separatist cells on planets that had aligned with the Confederation in the Clone Wars. Of course, it was actually more about punishing his detractors and putting down anybody who might have a structured resistance already in place (hamstringing the Alliance while it was still in it's infancy). Wilhuff Tarkin (yes, _that_ Tarkin) led the massacres. Unfortunately for the Empire, they weren't adept enough at silencing the press yet, and the media made a big stink about the murder of so many civilians, particularly the loyalists. To compensate, the Emperor moved Tarkin out into the Western Reaches (where he committed other, fun atrocities with presumably more care and attention for possible media blowback), and then eventually on to the Outer Rim to oversee the construction of a super-secret weapons development project. Meanwhile, [The Commission for the Preservation of the New Order (a subset of the Imperial Security Bureau) cleaned things up in the official records. It wasn't as perfectly done in the Antar 4 affair as it was later, during, say, the ](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Commission_for_the_Preservation_of_the_New_Order)[Bombardment of Bosph](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bombardment_of_Bosph), or even the [Massacre of Raydonia](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Massacre_on_Raydonia) (which happened during the Clone Wars, thus making it easy to just claim everyone involved was a combatant and the death and damage was just the cost of war). 
> 
> So, is Cassian keeping records of all the murdered peoples, particularly from former Separatist worlds? Yes, yes he is.


End file.
